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Painting Space in the work of Nikos Papaloukas

Feb 9 2017 to Feb 25 2017

Nikos Papaloukas is concerned about Land and People in a deeper, broader sense, as well as about Myth and Poetry; with them being carriers of values and truths, he finds himself on a continuous dialogue between them, giving his works their specific derived form as visual artifacts. The visual Artist creates a visible painting place, where he stresses a certain amount of superiority of Vision as opposed to other senses, giving it a somewhat metaphysical dimension. In his works, objects are being transformed abstractly, aiming for the spectator to launch higher brain activities reaching mental enlightenment and euphoria.

Nikos Papaloukas states: Art surmises through the creation of forms, which logic cannot grasp. It surmises a truth that exists beyond objects or a truth that exists within objects and defines them. Through the creation of form, space gives dimensions to time, making it into present, as a memory and as an expectation. It makes it present in a special and unique way, as it had never existed before. Art being a purely mental function points the way. We can exist in another way. The conjectured event is a piece of evidence. Art can teach us, whenever we come into communication with it. It stirs and enthrals us, whenever we partake of it through an artistic event like Holy Communion.

Christodoulos Kallinos wrote about the artist’s work: Although Papaloukas began as a painter endowed with particular sensitivity to colour and to the subjective expressiveness of human form, he has become increasingly engaged with the architecture of pictorial composition. In his most recent work he has forsaken, to a certain degree, his intoxication with the warmth and sensuality of colour, concerning himself more and more with visual exploration of plastic values. He experiments with purely conceptual representation of reality, in keeping with the chief preoccupation of modern art from Cézanne onwards. Moving away from more visual and sensory means of representation, he arrives at an anti-naturalistic sense of form, rendering figures of geometrical flat shapes which he integrates into the pictorial space by applying a modern understanding of proportion, harmony, plasticity and perspective. Composition is built with planar forms and controlled lines which allow the release of expressive detail to add to the structural perfection and clarity of the whole. Pictorial exploration arrives at the solid plastic forms, rendered with geometrical harmony and lucidity. An expressive plasticity of structure is created with geometric, simplified volumes, clear and absolute in character.